Seeing Yugoslavia through a dark glass

By Diana Johnstone, CovertAction Quarterly, Fall
1998

Politics, Media and the Ideology of Globalization

Years of experience in and out of both mainstream and alternative
media have made me aware of the power of the dominant ideology to
impose certain interpretations on international news. During the cold
War, most world news for American consumption had to be framed as part
of the Soviet-U.S. contest. Since then, a new ideological bias frames
the news. The way the violent fragmentation of Yugoslavia has been
reported is the most stunning example.

I must admit that it took me some time to figure this out, even though
I had a long-standing interest in and some knowledge of Yugoslavia. I
spent time there as a student in 1953, living in a Belgrade dormitory
and learning the language. In 1984., in a piece for “In These
Times”, I warned that extreme decentralization, conflicting
economic interests between the richer and poorer regions, austerity
policies imposed by the IMF, and the decline of universal ideals were
threatening Yugoslavia with “re-Balkanization” in the wake
of Tito's death and desanctification. “Local ethnic
interests are reasserting themselves”. I wrote, “The
danger is that these rival local interests may become involved in the
rivalries of outside powers. This is how the Balkans in the past were
a powder keg of world war.” Writing this took no special
clairvoyance. The danger of Yugoslavia's disintegration was quite
obvious to all serious observers well before Slobodan Milosevic
arrived on the scene.

As the country was torn apart in the early nineties, I was unable to
keep up with all that was happening. In those years, my job as press
officer for the Greens in the European Parliament left me no time to
investigate the situation myself. Aware that there were serious flaws
in the way media and politicians were reacting. I wrote an article
warning against combating “nationalism” by taking sides
for one nationalism against another, and against judging a complex
situation by analogy with totally different times and places.
“Every nationalism stimulates others”. I noted,
“Historical analogies should be drawn with caution and never
allowed to obscure the facts.” However, there was no stopping
the tendency to judge the Balkans, about which most people knew
virtually nothing, by analogy with Hitler Germany, about which people
at least imagined they knew a lot, and which enabled analysis to be
rapidly abandoned in favour of moral certitude and righteous
indignation.

However, it was only later, when I was able to devote considerable
time to my own research, that I realized the extent of the
deception-which is in large part self-deception.

I mention all this to stress that I understand the immense difficulty
of gaining a clear view of the complex situation in the Balkans. The
history of the region and the interplay of internal political
conflicts and external influences would be hard to grasp even without
propaganda distortions. Nobody can be blamed for being
confused. Moreover, by now, many people have invested so much emotion
in a one-sided view of the situation that they are scarcely able to
consider alternative interpretations.

It is not necessarily because particular journalists or media are
“alternative” that they are free from the dominant
interpretation and the dominant world view. In fact, in the case of
the Yugoslav tragedy, the irony is that “alternative” or
“left” activists and writers have - frequently taken the
lead in likening the Serbs, the people who most wanted to continue to
live in multi-cultural Yugoslavia, to Nazi racists, and in calling for
military intervention on behalf of ethnically defined secessionist
movements11 “Ethnically defined” because, despite the
argument accepted by the international community that it was the
Republics that could invoke the right to secede, all the political
arguments surrounding recognition of independent Slovenia and Croatia
dwelt on the right of Slovenes and Croats as such to
self-determination.—all supposedly in the name of
“multi-cultural Bosnia”, a country which, unlike
Yugoslavia, would have to be built from scratch by outsiders.

The Serbs and Yugoslavia

Like other Christian peoples in the Ottoman Empire, the Serbs were
heavily taxed and denied ownership of property of political power
reserved for Muslims. In the early years of the nineteenth century,
Serb farmers led a revolt that spread to Greece. The century-long
struggle put an end to the Ottoman Empire.

The Habsburg monarchy found it natural that when one empire receded,
another should advance, and sought to gain control over the lands lost
to the Ottoman Turks. Although Serbs had rallied to the Habsburgs in
earlier wars against the Turks, Serbia soon appeared to Vienna as the
main obstacle to its own expansion into the Balkans. By the end of the
nineteenth century, Vienna was seeking to fragment the Serb-inhabited
lands to prevent what it named “Greater Serbia”, taking
control of Bosnia-Herzegovina and fostering the birth of Albanian
nationalism (as converts to Islam, Albanian feudal chieftains enjoyed
privileges under the Ottoman Empire and combated the Christian
liberation movements).

Probably because they had been deprived of full citizens rights under
the Ottoman Turks, and because their own society of farmers and
traders was relatively egalitarian, Serb political leaders throughout
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were extremely receptive
to the progressive ideals of the French Revolution. While all the
other liberated Balkan nations imported German princelings as their
new kings, the Serbs promoted their own pig farmers into a dynasty,
one of whose members translated John Stuart Mill's “On
Liberty” into Serbian during his student days. Nowhere in the
Balkans did Western progressive ideas exercise such attraction as in
Serbia, no doubt due to the historic circumstances of the
country's emergence from four hundred years of subjugation.

Meanwhile, intellectuals in Croatia, a province of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire increasingly rankling under subordination to the
Hungarian nobility, initiated the Yugoslav movement for cultural, and
eventually political, unification of the South Slav peoples, notably
the Serbs and Croats, separated by history and religion (the Serbs
having been converted to Christianity by the Greek Orthodox Church and
the Croats by the Roman Catholic Church) but united by language. The
idea of a “Southslavia” was largely inspired by the
national unification of neighbouring Italy, occurring around the same
time.

In 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire seized the pretext of the
assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand to declare war and
crush Serbia once and for all. When Austria-Hungary lost the world war
it had thus initiated, leaders in Slovenia and Croatia chose to unite
with Serbia in a single kingdom. This decision enabled both Slovenia
and Croatia to go from the losing to the winning side in World War I,
thereby avoiding war reparations and enlarging their territory,
notably on the Adriatic coast, and the expense of Italy. The joint
Kingdom was renamed “Jugoslavia” in 1929. The conflicts
between Croats and Serbs that plagued what is called “the first
Yugoslavia” were described by Rebecca West in her celebrated
book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, first published in 1941.

In April 1941., Serb patriots in Belgrade led a revolt against an
accord reached between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Nazi
Germany. This led to Nazi bombing of Belgrade, a German invasion,
creation of an independent fascist state of Croatia (including
Bosnia-Herzegovina), and attachment of much of the Serbian province of
Kosovo to Albania, then a puppet of Mussolini's Italy. The
Croatian Ustashe undertook a policy of genocide against Serbs, Jews,
and Gypsies within the territory of their “Greater
Croatia”, while the Germans raised 55 divisions among the
Muslims of Bosnia and Albania.

In Serbia itself, the German occupants announced that one hundred
Serbian hostages would be executed for each German killed by
resistance fighters. The threat was carried out. As a result, the
royalist Serbian resistance (the first guerrilla resistance to Nazi
occupation in Europe) led by Draza Mihailovic adopted a policy of
holding off attacks on the Germans in expectation of an Allied
invasion. The Partisans, led by Croatian communist Josip Broz Tito,
adopted a more active strategy of armed resistance, which made
considerable gains in the predominantly Serb border regions of Croatia
and Bosnia and won support from Churchill for its effectiveness. A
civil war developed between Mihailovic's “Chetniks”
and Tito's Partisans—which was also a civil war between
Serbs, since Serbs were the most numerous among the Partisans. These
divisions between Serbs—torn between Serbian and Yugoslav
identity—have never been healed and help explain the deep
confusion among Serbs during the breakup of Yugoslavia.

After World War II, the new Communist Yugoslavia tried to build
“brotherhood and unity” on the myth that all the peoples
had contributed equally to liberation from fascism. Mihailovic was
executed, and school children in post-war Yugoslavia learned more
about the “fascist” nature of his Serbian nationalist
Chetniks than they did about Albanian and bosnian Muslims who had
volunteered for the 55, or even about the killing of Serbs in the
Jasenovac death camp run by Ustashe in Western Bosnia.

After the 1948 break with Moscow, the Yugoslav communist leadership
emphasized its difference from the Soviet bloc by adopting a policy of
“self-management”, supposed to lead by fairly rapid stages
to the “withering away of the State”. “Tito
repeatedly revised the Constitution to strengthen local authorities,
while retaining final decision-making power for himself. When he died
in 1980, he thus left behind a hopelessly complicated system that
could not work without his arbitration”. Serbia in particular
was unable to enact vitally necessary reforms because its territory
had been divided up, with two “autonomous provinces,”
Vojvodina and Kosovo, able to veto measures taken by Serbia, while
Serbia could not intervene in their affairs.

In the 1980's, the rise in interest rates and unfavourable world
trade conditions dramatically increased the foreign debt Yugoslavia
(like many “third world” countries) had been encouraged to
run up thanks to its standing in the West as a socialist country not
belonging to the Soviet bloc. The IMF arrived with its familiar
austerity measures, which could only be taken by a central
government. The leaders of the richer republics -Slovenia and
Croatia—did not want to pay for the poorer ones. Moreover, in
all former socialist countries, the big political question is
privatization of State and Social property, and local communist
leaders in Slovenia and Croatia could expect to get a greater share
for themselves within the context of division of Yugoslavia into
separate little states.

At that stage, a gradual, negotiated dismantling of Yugoslavia into
smaller States was not impossible. It would have entailed reaching
agreement on division of assets and liabilities, and numerous
adjustments to take into account conflicting interests. If pursued
openly, however, it might have encountered popular opposition-after
all, very many people, perhaps a majority, enjoyed being citizens of a
large country with an enviable international reputation. What would
have been the result of a national referendum on the question of
preservation of Yugoslavia?

None was ever held. The first multiparty elections in postwar
Yugoslavia were held in 1990, not nationwide in all of Yugoslavia, but
separately by each Republic—a method which in itself reinforces
separatist power elites. Sure of the active sympathy of Germany,
Austria, and the Vatican, leaders in Slovenia and Croatia, prepared
the fait accompli22Recognition of the internal administrative borders
between the republics as “inviolable” international
borders was in effect legal trick, contrary to international law,
which turned the Yugoslav army into an “aggressor” within
the boundaries its soldiers had sworn to defend and which transformed
the Serbs within Croatia and Bosnia, who opposed secession from their
country -Yugoslavia, into secessionists. This recognition flagrantly
violated the principles of the 1975 Final Act (known as the Helsinki
Accords) of the Conference on, now organisation for, Security and
Cooperation in Europe, notably the territorial integrity of states and
nonintervention in internal affairs. Truncated Yugoslavia was
thereupon expelled from the OSCI in 1992. sparing its other members
from having to hear Belgrade's point of view. Indeed, the
sanctions against Yugoslavia covered culture and sports, thus
eliminating for several crucial years any opportunity for Serbian
Yugoslavs to take part in international forums and events where the
one-sided view of “the Serbs” presented by their
adversaries might have been challenged. of unilateral, unnegotiated
secession, proclaimed in 1991. Such secession was illegal, under
Yugoslav and international law, and was certain to precipitate civil
war. The key role of German (and Vatican) support was to provide rapid
international recognition of the new independent republics, in order
to transform Yugoslavia into an “aggressor on its own
territory”.

Political Motives

The political motives that launched the anti-Serb propaganda campaign
are obvious enough. Claiming that it was impossible to stay in
Yugoslavia because the Serbs were so oppressive was the pretext for
the nationalist leaders in Slovenia and Croatia to set up their own
little statelets which, thanks to early and strong German support,
could “jump the queue” and get into the richmen's
European club ahead of the rest of Yugoslavia.

The terrible paradox is that very many people, in the sincere desire
to oppose racism and aggression, have in fact contributed to
demonizing an entire people, the Serbs, thereby legitimizing both
ethnic separatism and the new role of NATO as occupying power in the
Balkans on behalf of a theoretical “international
community”.

Already in the 1980's, Croatian and ethnic Albanian separatist
lobbies had stepped up their efforts to win support abroad, notably in
Germany and the United States33In Washington, the campaign on behalf
of Albanian separatists in Kosovo was spearheaded by Representative
Joe Dio Gaurdi of New York, who after loosing his congressional seat
in 1988 has continued his lobbying for the cause. An early and
influential convert to the cause was Senator Robert Dole. In Germany,
the project for the political unification of all Croatian
nationalists, but communists and Ustashe, with aim of seceding and
establishing “Greater Croatia” was followed closely and
sympathetically by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND, West
Germany's CIA, which hoped to gain its own sphere of influence on
the Adriatic from the breakup of Yugoslavia. The nationalist
unification which eventually brought former communist general Franjo
Tudjman to power in Zagreb with the support of the Ustashe diaspora,
got seriously under way after Tito's death in 1980, during the
years when Bonn's current foreign minister Claus Kinkel, was
heading the BND. See Erich Schmidt-Echboom, Der Schattenkrieger: Klaus
Kinkel und der BND (Dusseldorf; ECON Verlag, 1995) , by claiming to be
oppressed by Serbs, citing “evidence” that, insofar as it
had any basis in truth, referred to the 1920-1941 Yugoslav Kingdom,
not to the very different post-World War II Yugoslavia.

The current campaign to demonize the Serbs began in July 1991 with a
virulent barrage of articles in the German media, led by the
influential conservative newspaper, the “Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung” (FAZ). In almost daily columns, FAZ editor Johann Georg
Reismuller justified the freshly, and illegally, declared
“independence” of Slovenia and Croatia by describing
“Yugo- Serbs” as essentially Oriental “militarist
Bolsheviks” who have “no place in the European
Community”. Nineteen months after German reunification, and for
the first time since Hitler's defeat in 1945, German media
resounded with condemnation of an entire ethnic group reminiscent of
the pre-war propaganda against the Jews”.

This German propaganda binge was the signal that times had changed
seriously. Only a few years earlier, a seemingly broad German peace
movement had stressed the need to put an end to “enemy
stereotypes” (Feindbilder). Yet the sudden ferocious emergence
of the enemy stereotype of “the Serbs” did not shock
liberal of left Germans, who were soon repeating it themselves. It
might seem that the German peace movement had completed its historic
mission once its contribution to altering the image of Germany had led
Gorbachev to endorse reunification. The least one can say is that the
previous efforts at reconciliation with peoples who suffered from Nazi
invasion stopped short when it same to the Serbs.

In the Bundestag, German Green leader Joschka Fisher pressed for
disavowal of “pacifism” in order to “combat
Auschwitz”, thereby equating Serbs with Nazis. In a heady mood
of self- righteous indignation, German politicians across the board
joined in using Germany's past guilt as a reason, not for
restraint, as had been the logic up until reunification, but on the
contrary, for “bearing their share of the military
burden”. In the name of human rights, the Federal Republic of
Germany abolished its ban on military operations outside the NATO
defensive area. Germany could once again be a “normal”
military power—thanks to the “Serb threat”.

The near unanimity was all the more surprising in that the
“enemy stereotype” of the Serb had been dredged up from
the most belligerent German nationalism of the past. “Serbien
muss sterbien” (a play on the word sterben, to die), meaning
“Serbia must die” was a famous popular war cry of World
War I. Serbs had been singled out for slaughter during the Nazi
occupation of Yugoslavia. One would have thought that the younger
generation of Germans, seemingly so sensitive to the victims of
Germany's aggressive past, would have at least urged caution. Very
few did.

On the contrary, what occurred in Germany was a strange sort of mass
transfer of Nazi identity, and guilt, to the Serbs. In the case of the
Germans, this can be seen as a comforting psychological projection
which served to give Germans a fresh and welcome sense of innocence in
the face of the new “criminal” people, the Serbs, But the
hate campaign against Serbs, started in Germany, did not stop
there. Elsewhere, the willingness to single out one of the Yugoslav
peoples as the villain calls for other explanations.

Media Momentum

From the start, foreign reporters were better treated in Zagreb and in
Ljubljana, whose secessionist leaders understood the prime importance
of media images in gaining international support, than in
Belgrade. The Albanian secessionists in Kosovo or
“Kosovars”44Albanians in Albania and in Yugoslavia call
themselves “Shqiptare” but recently have objected to being
called that by others. “Albanians” is an old and accepted
term. Especially when addressing international audiences in the
context of the separatist cause. Kosovo Albanians prefer to call
themselves “Kosovars”, which has political
implications. Logically, the term should apply to all inhabitants of
the province of Kosovo, regardless of ethnic identity, but by
appropriating it for themselves alone, the Albanian
“Kosovars” imply that Serbs and other non-Albanians are
intruders. This is similar to the Muslim parties appropriation of the
term “Bosniak” which implies that the Muslim population of
Bosnia-Herzegovina is more indigenous than the Serbs and Croats, which
makes no sense, since the Bosnian Muslims are simply Serbs and Croats
who converted to Islam after the Ottoman conquest. , the Croatian
secessionists and the Bosnian Muslims hired an American public
relations firm, Ruder Finn, to advance their causes by demonizing the
Serbs55The role of the Washington public relations firm, Ruder Finn,
is by now well-known, but seems to have raised few doubts as to the
accuracy of the anti-Serb propaganda it successfully diffused.. Ruder
Finn deliberately targeted certain publics, notably the American
Jewish community, with a campaign likening Serbs to Nazis. Feminists
were also clearly targeted by the Croatian nationalist campaign
directed out of Zagreb to brand Serbs as rapists66No one denies that
many rapes occurred during the civil war in Croatia and
Bosnia-Herzegovina, or that rape is a serious violation of human
rights. So is war, for that matter. From the start, however, inquiry
into rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina focused exclusively on accusations
that Serbs were raping Muslim women as part of a deliberate
strategy. The most inflated figures, freely extricated by multiplying
the number of known cases by large factors, were readily accepted by
the media and international organizations. No interest was shown in
detailed and documented reports of rapes of Serbian women by Muslims
or Croats.

The late Nora Beloff, former chief political correspondent of the
“London Observer”, described her own search in
verification of the rape charges in a letter to “The Daily
Telegraph” (January 19, 1993). The British Foreign Office
conceded that the rape figures being handled about were really
uncorroborated and referred her to the Danish government, then
chairing the European Union. Copenhagen agreed that the reports were
unsubstantiated, but kept repeating them. Both said that the EU has
taken up the “rape atrocity” issue at its December 1992
Edinburgh Summit exclusively on the basis of a German initiative. In
turn, Fran Wild, in charge of the Bosnian Desk in the German Foreign
Ministry, told Ms. Beloff that the material on Serb rapes came partly
from the Izetbegovic government and partly from the Catholic charity
Caritas in Croatia. No effort had been made to seek corroboration from
more impartial sources..

The Yugoslav story was complicated; anti-Serb stories had the
advantage of being simple and available, and they provided an easy-
to-use moral compass by designating the bad guys.

As the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina got under way in mid-1992, American
journalists who repeated unconfirmed stories of Serbian atrocities
could count on getting published with a chance of a Pulitzer Prize.
Indeed, the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting was shared
between the two authors of the most sensational “Serb atrocity
stories” of the year: Roy Gutman of “Newsday” and
John Burns of the “New York Times”. In both cases, the
prize-winning articles were based on hearsay evidence of dubious
credibility. Gutman's articles, mostly based on accounts by
Muslim refugees in the Croatian capital, Zagreb, were collected in a
book rather misleadingly entitled “A Witness to Genocide”,
although in fact he had been a “witness” to nothing of the
sort, His allegations that Serbs were running “death
camps” were picked up by Ruder Finn and widely diffused, notably
to Jewish organizations. Burns's story was no more than an
interview with a mentally deranged prisoner in a Sarajevo jail, who
confessed to crimes some of which have been since proved never to have
been committed.

On the other hand, there was no market for stories by a journalist who
discovered that reported Serbian “rape camps” did not
exist (German TV reporter Martin Lettmayer), or who included
information about Muslim or Croat crimes against Serbs (Belgian
journalist Georges Berghezan for one). It became increasingly
impossible to challenge the dominant interpretation in major
media. Editors naturally prefer to keep the story simple: one villain,
and as much blood as possible. Moreover, after the German government
forced the early recognition of Slovenian and Croatian independence,
other Western powers lined up opportunistically with the anti-Serb
position. The United States soon moved aggressively into the game by
picking its own client state - Muslim Bosnia—out of the ruins.

Foreign news has always ben much easier to distort than domestic news.
Television coverage simply makes the distortion more convincing. TV
crews sent into strange places about which they know next to nothing,
send back images of violence that give millions of viewers the
impression that “everybody knows what is happening”. Such
an impression is worse than plain ignorance.

Today, worldwide media such as CNN openly put pressure on governments
to respond to the “public opinion” which the media
themselves create. Christine Amanpour tells the U.S. and the European
Union what they should be doing in Bosnia; to what extent this is
coordinated with U.S. agencies is hard to tell. Indeed, the whole
question of which tail wags the dog is wide open. Do media manipulate
government, does government manipulate media, or are influential
networks manipulating both?

Many officials of Western governments complain openly or privately of
being forced into unwise policy decisions by “the pressure of
public opinion”, meaning the media. A particularly interesting
testimony in this regard is that of Otto von Habsburg, the extremely
active and influential octogenarian heir to the defunct
Austro-Hungarian Empire, today a member of the European Parliament
from Bavaria, who has taken a great and one might say paternal
interest in the cause of Croatian independence. “If Germany
recognized Slovenia and Croatia so rapidly”, Habsburg told the
Bonn correspondent of the French daily “Figaro”;
“even against the will of (then German foreign minister)
Hans-Dietrich Genscher who did not want to take that step, its because
the Bonn government was subjected to an almost irresistible pressure
of public opinion. In this regard, the German press rendered a very
great service, in particular the ‘Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung’ and Carl Gustav Strohm, that great German journalist
who works for Die Welt”.

Still, the virtually universal acceptance of a one-sided view of
Yugoslavia's collapse cannot be attributed solely to political
designs or to sensationalist manipulation of the news by major
media. It also owes a great deal to the ideological uniformity
prevailing among educated liberals who have become the consensual
moral conscience in Northwestern Euro-American society since the end
of the Cold War.

Down with the State

This ideology is the expression in moralistic terms of the dominant
project for reshaping the world since the United States emerged as
sole superpower after the defeat of communism and collapse of the
Soviet Union. United States foreign policy for over a century has
been dictated by a single overriding concern: to open world markets to
American capital and American enterprise. Today this project is
triumphant as “economic globalization”. Throughout the
world, government policies are judged, approved or condemned
decisively not by their populations but by “the markets”
meaning the financial markets. Foreign investors, not domestic
voters, decide policy.

The International Monetary Fund and other such agencies are there to
help governments adjust their policies and their societies to market
imperatives.

The shift of decision-making power away from elected governments,
which is an essential aspect of this particular “economic
globalization”, is being accompanied by an ideological assault
on the nation-state as a political community exercising sovereignty
over a defined territory. For all its shortcomings, the nation-state
is still the political level most apt to protect citizens' welfare
and the environment from the destructive expansion of global
markets. Dismissing the nation-state as an anachronism, or condemning
it as a mere expression of “nationalist” exclusivism,
overlooks and undermines its long-standing legitimacy as the focal
point of democratic development, in which citizens can organize to
define and defend their interests.

The irony is that many well-intentioned idealists are unwittingly
helping to advance this project by eagerly promoting its moralistic
cover a theoretical global democracy that should replace attempts to
strengthen democracy at the supposedly obsolete nation-state level.

Within the United States, the link between anti-nation-state ideology
and economic globalization is blurred by the double standard of U.S.
leaders who do not hesitate to invoke the supremacy of
U.S. “national interest” over the very international
institutions they promote in order to advance economic
globalization. This makes it seem that such international institutions
are a serious obstacle to U.S. global power rather than its
expression. However, the United States has the overall military and
political power to design and control key international institutions
(e.g., the IMF, the World Trade Organization, and the International
Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia), as well as to undermine
those it dislikes (UNESCO when it was attempting to promote liberation
of media from essentially American control) or to flout international
law with impunity (notably in its Central American
“backyard”). Given the present relationship of forces,
weakening less powerful nation-states cannot strengthen international
democracy, but simply tighten the grip of transnational capital and
the criminal networks that flourish in an environment of lawless
acquisition.

There is no real contradiction between asserting the primacy of U.S.
interests and blasting the nation-state barriers that might allow some
organized defense of the interests of other peoples. But impressed by
the apparent contradiction, some American liberals are comforted in
their belief that nationalism is the number one enemy of mankind,
whereas anything that goes against it is progressive.

Indeed, an important asset of the anti-nation-state ideology is its
powerful appeal to many liberals and progressives whose
internationalism has been disoriented by the collapse of any
discernable socialist alternative to capitalism and by the disarray of
liberation struggles in the South of the planet.

In the absence of any clear analysis of the contemporary world, the
nation-state is readily identified as the cause of war, oppression,
and violations of human rights. In short, the only existing context
for institutionalized democracy is demonized as the mere expression of
a negative, exclusive ideology, “nationalism”. This
contemporary libertarian view overlooks both the persistence of war in
the absence of strong States and the historic function of the
nation-state as framework for the social pact embodied in democratic
forms of legislative decision-making.

Condemnation of the nation-state in a structuralist rather than
historical perspective produces mechanical judgments. What is smaller
than the nation-state, or what transcends the nation-state, must be
better. On the smaller scale, “identities” of all kinds,
or “regions”, generally undefined, are automatically
considered more promising by much of the current generation. On the
larger scale, the hope for democracy is being transferred to the
European Union, or to international NGOs, or to theoretical
institutions such as the proposed International Criminal Court. In the
enthusiasm for an envisaged global utopia, certain crucial questions
are being neglected, notably: who will pay for all this? How? Who will
enforce which decisions? Until such practical matters are cleared up,
brave new institutions such as the I.C.C. risk being no more than
further instruments of selective intervention against weaker
countries. But the illusion persists that structures of international
democracy can be built over the heads of States that are not
themselves genuinely supportive of such democracy.

The simplistic interpretation of the Yugoslav crisis as Serbian
“aggression” against peaceful multi-cultural Europe, is
virtually unassailable, because it is not only credible according to
this ideology but seems to confirm it.

It was this ideology that made it possible for the Croatian,
Slovenian, and Albanian secessionists and their supporters in Germany
and the United States in particular to portray the Yugoslav conflict
as the struggle of “oppressed little nations” to free
themselves from aggressive Serbian nationalism. In fact, those
“little nations” were by no means oppressed in
Yugoslavia. Nowhere in the world were and are the cultural rights of
national minorities so extensively developed as in Yugoslavia
(including the small Yugoslavia made up of Serbia and
Montenegro). Politically, not only was Tito himself a Croat and his
chief associate, Edvard Kardelj, a Slovene, but a “national
key” quotasystem was rigorously applied to all top posts in the
Federal Administration and Armed Forces. The famous
“self-management socialism” gave effective control over
economic enterprises to Slovenians in Slovenia, Croatians in Croatia,
and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. The economic gap between the parts of
Yugoslavia which had previously belonged to the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, that is, Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia's northern province
of Vojvodina, on the one hand, and the parts whose development had
been retarded by Ottoman rule (central Serbia, the Serbian province of
Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia) continued to widen
throughout both the first and second Yugoslavia. The secession
movement in Slovenia was a typical “secession of the rich from
the poor” (comparable to Umberto Bossi's attempt to detach
rich northern Italy form the rest of the country, in order to avoid
paying taxes for the poor South). In Croatia, this motivation was
combined with the comeback of Ustashe elements which had gone into
exile after World War II.

The nationalist pretext of “oppression” is favoured by the
economic troubles of the 1980's, which led leaders in each
Republic to shun the others, and to overlook the benefits of the
larger Federal market for all the Republics. The first and most
virulent nationalist movements arose in Croatia and Kosovo, where
separatism had been favoured by Axis occupation of the Balkans in
World War II. It is only in the 1980's that a much milder Serbian
nationalist reaction to economic troubles provided the opportunity for
all the others to pinpoint the universal scapegoat: Serbian
nationalism. Western public opinion, knowing little of Yugoslavia and
thinking in terms of analogies with more familiar situations, readily
sympathized with Slovenian and Croatian demands for independence. In
reality, international law interprets “self-
determination” as the right to secede and form an independent
State only in certain (mostly colonial) circumstances, none of which
applied to Slovenia and Croatia77See: Barbara Delcouri & Olivier
Carten, Ex-Yougoslavie: Droit International, Politique et Ideologies
(Brussels: Editions Bruylam, Editions de l’Universite de
Bruxelles, 1997). The authors, specialists in international law at the
Free University of Brussels, point out that there was no basis under
international law for the secession of the Yugoslav Republics. The
principle of “self-determination” was totally inapplicable
in those cases..

All these fact were ignored by international media. Appeals to the
dominant anti-State ideology led to frivolous acceptance in the West
of the very grave act of accepting the unnegotiated breakup of an
existing nation. Yugoslavia, by interpreting ethnic secession as a
proper form of “self-determination”, which it is
not. There is no parallel in recent diplomatic annals for such an
irresponsible act, and as a precedent it can only promise endless
bloody conflict around the world.

The New World Order

In fact, the break-up of Yugoslavia has served to discredit and
further weaken the United Nations, while providing a new role for an
expending NATO. Rather than strengthening international order, it has
helped shift the balance of power within the international order
toward the dominant nation—states, the United States and
Germany. If somebody had announced in 1989 that, well, the Berlin Wall
has come down, now Germany can unite and send military forces back
into Yugoslavia—and what is more in order to enforce a partition
of the country along similar lines to those it imposed when it
occupied the country in 1941—well, quite a number of people
might have raised objections. However, that is what has happened, and
many of the very people might who have been expected to object most
strongly to what amounts to the most significant act of historical
revisionism since World War II have provided the ideological cover and
excuse.

Perhaps dazed by the end of the Cold War, much of what remains of the
left in the early nineties abandoned its critical scrutiny of the
geostrategic Realpolitik underlying great power policies in general
and U.S. policy in particular and seemed to believe that the world
henceforth was determined by purely moral considerations.

This has much to do with the privatization of “the left”
in the past twenty years or so. The United States has led the way in
this trend. Mass movements aimed at overall political action have
declined, while single-issue movements have managed to continue. The
single-issue movements in turn engender non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) which, because of the requirements of fund- raising, need to
adapt their causes to the mood of the times, in other words, to the
dominant ideology to the media. Massive fund-raising is easiest for
victims, using appeals to sentiment rather than to reason. Greenpeace
has found that it can raise money more easily for baby seals than for
combatting the development of nuclear weapons. This fact of life
steers NGO activity in certain directions, away from political
analysis toward sentiment. On another level, the NGOs offer idealistic
internationalists a rare opportunity to intervene all around the world
in matters of human rights and human welfare.

And herein lies a new danger. Just as the “civilizing
mission” of bringing Christianity to the heathen provided a
justifying pretext for imperialist conquest of Asia and Africa in the
past, today the protection of “human rights” may be the
cloak for a new type of imperialist military intervention worldwide.

Certainly, human rights are an essential concern of the
left. Moreover, many individuals committed to worthy causes have
turned to NGOs as the only available alternative to the decline of
mass movements—a decline over which they have no control. Even a
small NGO addressing a problem is no doubt better than nothing at
all. The point is that great vigilance is needed, in this as in all
other endeavours, to avoid letting good intentions be manipulated to
serve quite contrary purposes.

In a world now dedicated to brutal economic rivalry, where the rich
get richer and the poor get poorer, human rights abuses can only
increase. From this vast array of mans inhumanity to man, Western
media and governments are unquestionably more concerned about human
rights abuses that obstruct the penetration of transnational
capitalism, to which they are organically linked, than about, say, the
rights of Russian miners who have not been paid for a year. Media and
government selectivity not only encourages humanitarian NGOs to follow
their lead in focusing on certain countries and certain types of
abuses, the case-by-case approach also distracts from active criticism
of global economic structures that favour the basic human rights abuse
of a world split between staggering wealth and dire poverty.

Cuba is not the only country whose “human rights” may be
the object of extraordinary concern by governments trying to replace
local rulers with more compliant defenders of transnational
interests. Such a motivation can by no means be ruled out in the case
of the campaign against Serbia. In such situations, humanitarian NGOs
risk being cast in the role of the missionaries of the
past—sincere, devoted people who need to be
“protected”, this time by NATO military forces. The Somali
expedition provided a rough rehearsal (truly scandalous if examined
closely) for this scenario. On a much larger scale, first Bosnia, then
Kosovo, provide a vast experimental terrain for cooperation between
NGOs and NATO.

There is urgent need to take care to preserve genuine and legitimate
efforts on behalf of human rights from manipulation in the service of
other political ends. This is indeed a delicate challenge.

NGOs and NATO, hand in hand

In former Yugoslavia, and especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Western
NGOs have found a justifying role for themselves alongside NATO. They
gain funding and prestige from the situation. Local employees of
Western NGOs gain political and financial advantages over other local
people, and “democracy” is not the peoples choice but
whatever meets with approval of outside donors. This breeds arrogance
among the outside benefactors, and cynicism among local people, who
have the choice between opposing the outsiders or seeking to
manipulate them. It is an unhealthy situation, and some of the most
self-critical are aware of the dangers.

Perhaps the most effectively arrogant NGO in regard to former
Yugoslavia is the Vienna office of Human Rights Watch/Helsinki. On
September 18, 1997, that organization issued a long statement
announcing in advance that the Serbian elections to be held three days
later “will be neither free nor fair.” This astonishing
intervention was followed by a long list of measures that Serbia and
Yugoslavia must carry out or else”, and that the international
community must take to discipline Serbia and Yugoslavia. These demands
indicated an extremely broad interpretation of obligatory standards of
“human rights” as applied to Serbia, although not,
obviously, to everybody else, since they included new media laws
drafted “in full consultation with the independent media in
Yugoslavia” as well as permission meanwhile to all
“unlicensed but currently operating radio and television
stations to broadcast without interference”88Some 400 radio and
television stations have been operating in Yugoslavia with temporary
licenses or none at all. The vast majority are in Serbia, a country of
less than ten million inhabitants on a small territory of only 54.872
square miles.

Human Rights Watch/Helsinki concluded by calling on the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to “deny
Yugoslavia readmission to the OSCE until there are concrete
improvements in the country's human rights record, including
respect for freedom of the press, independence of the judiciary, and
minority rights, as well as cooperation with the International
Criminal Tribuna for the former Yugoslavia”.

As for the demand to “respect freedom of the press,” one
may wonder what measures would satisfy HRW, in light of the fact that
press freedom already exists in Serbia to an extent well beyond that
in many other countries not being served with such an ultimatum. There
exist in Serbia quite a range of media devoted to attacking the
government, not only in Serbo-Croatian, but also in Albanian. As of
one 1998, there were 2.319 print publications and 101 radio and
television stations in Yugoslavia, over twice the number that existed
in 1992. Belgrade alone has 14 daily newspapers. The state-supported
national dailies have a joint circulation of 180.000 compared to
around 350.000 for seven leading opposition dailies”.

Moreover, the judiciary in Serbia is
certainly no less independent than in Croatia or Muslim Bosnia, and
most certainly much more so. As for “minority rights,” it
would be hard to find a country anywhere in the world where they are
better protected in both theory and practice than in
Yugoslavia99Serbia is constitutionally defined as the nation of all
its citizens, and not “of the Serbs” (in contrast to
constitutional provisions of Croatia and Macedonia, for instance). In
addition, the 1992 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
(Serbia and Montenegro) as well as the Serbian Constitution guarantee
extensive rights to national minorities, notably the right to
education in their own mother tongue, the right to information media
in their own language, and the right to use their own language in
proceedings before a tribunal of other authority. These rights are not
merely formal, but are effectively respected as is shown by, for
instance, the satisfaction of the 400,000-strong Hungarian minority
and the large number of newspapers published by national minorities in
Albanian, Hungarian and other languages. Romani (Gypsies) are by all
accounts better treated in Yugoslavia than elsewhere in the
Balkans. Serbia has a large Muslim population of varied nationalities,
including refugees from Bosnia and a native Serb population of
converts to Islam in Southeastern Kosovo, known as Goranci, whose
religious rights national level. The only democracy it reorganizes is
that of the “international community”, which is summoned
to act according to the recommendations of Human Rights Watch. This
“international community”, the IC, is in reality no
democracy. Its decisions are formally taken at NATO meetings. The IC
is not even a “community”; the initials could more
accurately stand for “imperialist condominium”, a joint
exercise of domination by the former imperialist powers, torn apart
and weakened by two World Wars, now brought together under U.S.
domination with NATO as their military arm. Certainly there are
frictions between the members of this condominium, but so long as
their rivalries can be played out within the IC, the price will be
paid by smaller and weaker countries.

Media attention to conflicts in Yugoslavia is sporadic, dictated by
Great Power interests, lobbies, and the institutional ambitions of
“non-governmental organizations”—often linked to
powerful governments—whose competition with each other for
financial support provides motivation for exaggerating the abuses they
specialize in denouncing.

Yugoslavia, a country once known for its independent approach to
socialism and international relations, economically and politically by
far the most liberal country in Eastern Central Europe, has already
been torn apart by Western support to secessionist movements: What is
left is being further reduced to an ungovernable chaos by a
continuation of the same process. The emerging result is not a
charming bouquet of independent little ethnic democracies, but rather
a new type of joint colonial rule by the IC enforced by NATO.

Diana Johnstone was the European editor of In These Times from 1979 to
1990, and press officer of the Green group in the European Parliament
from 1990 to 1996. She is the author of The Politics of Euromissiles:
Europe in America's World (London/New York, Versa Schucken, 1984)
and is currently working on a book on the former Yugoslavia. This
article is an expended version of a talk given on May 25, 1998, at an
international conference on media held in Athens, Greece.